Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly (2008)

 

Director: Edwin

Screenplay: Edwin

Cast: Joko Anwar as Yahya; Clarine Baharrizki as Young Linda; Ladya Cheryl as Linda; Andhara Early as Salma; Carlo Genta as Cahyono; Pong Harjatmo as Halim; Wicaksono as Helmi

An Abstract List Candidate

 

No New Year's Day to celebrate

No chocolate covered candy hearts to give away

No first of spring, no song to sing

In fact, here's just another ordinary day

- "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder

 

Edwin is a figure I have been aware of if, tragically another figure really undermined by the difficulty to see his films. The one word named Indonesian director makes idiosyncratic short and feature length work, which look very different from each other. A snapshot of a family in A Very Slow Breakfast (2003) contrasts Dajang Soembi, the Woman Who Was Married to a Dog (2005), shot in a silent movie structure with intertitles. Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly is, by itself as his first theatrical length production, a puzzle in itself, where I will have to structure the film in points to properly explain and show admiration for it.

Blind Pig is mostly structured around one family. Verawheti, the mother and a former badminton player, is not seen as much but we do see her in her prime in a game, during Indonesia versus China, which sours and ends the game when a child in the audiences make the awkward comment asking which one of the female players in Indonesian. She eventually converts to Christianity in the later stages of her life, where we meet her watching a Christian show constantly on the television with a faith speaker as the host. Her husband, Gian Tik, is a dentist fixated with one specific song, which will be devoted to in its own paragraph. The daughter Linda, "the girl who eats fire crackers", is self explanatory, introduced on an online show which has previously has a girl who sleeps with scorpions. Our central character, she begins with one firecracker, in the most iconic image of the film, stuffed in a bun like a hot dog in her mouth and lighting the fuse. Her friend and potential love interest is Cahyono, who is part of the film's theme of the persecution of Chinese-Indonesians, who was so bullied for his ethnicity he now wants to be Japanese, always usually found in a baseball jersey with his mouth and nose bloodied from fighting.

For all the strange content and tangents, separated into titled chapters, Edwin's film is dealing with a very serious subject. It explicitly references, with Cahyono reworking news footage from the events, to the 1998 May riots that took place in Indonesia, protests over economic problems which tragically lead to violence against Chinese-Indonesians, a persecuted minority in the country. Arson, murder, vandalism of business and sexual violence took place, making this an uncomfortable subject to tackle let alone in a tone which is openly more peculiar on purpose with a lot of dark humour. Tackling this ten years afterwards as well, Edwin decided to have an openly whimsical and odd humour the film juxtapose against the serious issues that intercut between, not forgetting the severity of the subject.

We see Linda and Cahyono as children, bullied and called pigs by boys for their Chinese heritage. His parents separate him from her after this incident, feeding his disconnect, whilst her obsession with firecrackers both comes from the bullying incident, were we see where she tries to help him with them, and from a belief they ward away bad spirits. We have the reoccurring image of a pig tied outside in the countryside to a post, left trapped in this position until the animal can eventually escape into the underbrush. Or that Cahyono has turned the 1998 May Riot footage into karaoke with Stevie Wonder's I Just Called to Say I Love You.

That is the most curious touch to the film. Wonder's 1984 hit and one his most successful songs was also an Oscar winner, because it originated as part of actor Gene Wilder's The Woman in Red (1984), a film he also directed as well as started in, which adds such a curious cinematic connection in hindsight.  Resoundingly alien to Wonder's iconic image, sat by a piano, as it is with him using synthesizers and various electronic instruments, Blind Pig plays this song off as a running joke as the dentist is obsessed with singing the song whilst working with patients, leading to musical sing-along's with everyone baring the one with gloved fingers in their mouth. Eventually however this song, frankly awkward in the original version let along sung by the cast, has a surprising melancholy or at least a sense of thematically working, in a perverse way, once spliced over footage of people rioting and destroying property, footage we learn of being from the May 1998 riots and, if you read up on the subject even a little, became a tragedy. As the film also includes in narration over a retrospective news item, amongst what horrible things transpired also included people being burned to death trapped in buildings on fire. The song, which Edwin somehow managed to get the rights too, suddenly takes on a greater weight and becomes a perfect choice.

Beyond this, the film is a series of vignettes following these characters. The childhood friends are reunited. The dentist, who wishes to divorce his wife and convert to Islam, also has plans to be in a relationship with his female dental assistant. She herself wishes to be on a reality singing show Planet Idol before she will do this, and will require the help of a gay male couple, in a fractious moment of their relationship and requiring a male third in a moment to spice up their sex life, to help him with this request. Chronology occasionally fragments, as we intercut between Linda and Cahyono's childhood to the modern day, and throughout Edwin is contemplating the ten years which have past from the May riots.  Like other work I have seen of his, Edwin's short and theatrical films tend to not really follow a strict narrative through line, and likewise this film is a mood piece which evokes its themes. Baring one striking scene, how frank a threesome scene between the doctor and the two men is, in its quiet matter-of-factness in his dental office and how, not seeing anything, you still get semen on sunglasses, Blind Pig never openly directs itself to the main subject or become angry. This will be off-putting to some wishing it had taken a more strident viewpoint, that in itself became one of its more rewarding aspects for me. Like the Wonder song, the longer this film (only over seventy minutes) lingers in my mind and suddenly it acquires more detail.

Abstract Spectrum: Contemplative/Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None